Challenges Of Distributed Real-Time Finite-Difference Time-Domain Room Acoustic Simulation For Auralization

Large-scale wave-based room acoustic simulations are commonly considered computationally expensive. Distributed computing can be used to accommodate such methods for wide-bandwidth simulation, but may pose several challenges for real-time execution, such as communication and synchronization latencies between the computing hardware. In this paper, a system for real-time auralization of distributed finite-difference time-domain room acoustic simulation is proposed. Several experiments are conducted to measure the performance of the system. A proof-of-concept application where simulated responses from the distributed system are streamed to a virtual reality scene and auralized is constructed. It is found that distributed computing scales well with large off-line simulations, but synchronization latencies become a limiting factor in the implementation of a real-time system.